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PERSONAL NOTE Kurt Schork, an Inspirational Reuters Journalist

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PERSONAL NOTE Kurt Schork, an Inspirational Reuters Journalist PERSONAL NOTE Kurt Schork, an inspirational Reuters journalist who I worked with in East Timor, was shot dead in an ambush in Sierra Leone in May 2000 along with Miguel Gil Moreno de Mora of Associated Press Television; two other Reuters colleagues survived the ambush after a harrowing escape. I learned a huge amount during the few weeks I worked with Kurt as part of the Reuters team in Dili, based in a flooded and partially burned ground-floor room of the Hotel Turismo. He always behaved with disarming humility and respect, as a colleague and an equal, when in fact he was a legend and I was a clueless rookie. I found out he was dead when I sat down at my desk in Reuters Jakarta and saw that one of his most famous stories from Sarajevo had been reissued that day on Reuters screens; wondering why, I clicked on the headline to read the story, and then I knew. Harry Burton, an Australian journalist and cameraman who was a much loved member of the Jakarta bureau and also worked with us in East Timor, and Azizullah Haidari, a brave and witty Afghan colleague who I worked with in Pakistan, were killed on a stretch of highway between Jalalabad and Kabul in November 2001. A gang of armed bandits tried to halt a convoy of media vehicles heading for the Afghan capital, and managed to force one car to stop. Harry and Aziz were in that car, along with Maria Grazia Cutuli of Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, and Julio Fuentes of Spain's El Mundo. They were taken out of the car, led a short distance away, and then shot. I was in Islamabad helping anchor our coverage of the war in Afghanistan that followed the terrible events of September 11 when al Qaeda hijackers used airliners as giant suicide bombs to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Confused reports started to come in that the convoy had been ambushed, but most of the cars had got away. One by one, those cars arrived in Kabul, and we waited for news that the Reuters car was among them. I knew that Harry's partner Joanne Collins was at work at her desk in the Reuters Jakarta bureau and not yet aware of what was happening, and I called the bureau chief there and asked him to get her out of the office and arrange for somebody to sit with her at home. A little later, we knew that the only car not to have reached Kabul was ours, and the driver of a bus that had travelled the same highway said he had seen four corpses near the road. Over the next few days, I learned about the grim logistics of recovering bodies from remote and dangerous places. I had to find a refrigerated truck so Harry and Aziz would not start to decay during transit, and I had to find coffins; for Aziz, a simple wooden coffin in accordance with Islamic tradition, and for Harry, a Western-style casket, much less easy to find in Islamabad. While I was doing this, I was also exceptionally busy working shifts of 18 hours and upwards – and on two occasions working 36-hour shifts without sleep from morning right through the night and into the following evening. I remember feeling strangely emotionless about the deaths of Harry and Aziz – Harry in particular as he was a personal friend – and I wondered at the time whether maybe there was something wrong with me because I should be more upset. I only cried once, very briefly, when a very helpful British official at the UK embassy in Islamabad who I had asked for assistance phoned me to say he had a few coffins and to ask how tall Harry was, so we could decide which sized coffin would be best. There was something so jarring in the matter-of- fact discussion of necessary little details about a friend who had died so suddenly and horribly that it got through my defences and I broke down in tears and had to hang up the phone, and then composed myself and rang back. After that I just carried on working, in Islamabad and then onto a dangerous assignment in Kandahar. Everybody praised me afterwards for how well I had kept my head in such difficult circumstances and done such a fine job, and at the time I thought that was something to be proud of. It was only many years later that I suddenly was hit by the full emotional impact of what had happened, as well as shame that my response at the time had been so inadequate. I spent a long time trying to make peace with what happened. Even now I can’t discuss or write about Harry without breaking down. I should add that I consider that to be a normal and healthy reaction and I think it represents progress. During my time in Kandahar I got to know Taras Protsyuk, a Ukrainian cameraman brimming with energy and optimism. We rode around Kandahar in a battered old car with Taras wearing a cowboy hat, and joked about how strange it was to not have seen a woman for weeks - women in Kandahar start wearing a burqa in public as soon as they reach puberty. One day our Afghan fixer Najeebullah, a rich young Kandahari who was always seemed to be either grinning or obsessively combing his carefully oiled hair, wanted to take a detour to go and see his girlfriend in the walled compound of a wealthy family just outside Kandahar. Taras and I sat in a courtyard outside, chatting, and we kept seeing sudden flashes of vivid colour and hearing giggles as the women in the compound, wearing richly coloured clothes at home in contrast to the dour blue burqas they put on when they go out, repeatedly peeked out of windows to look at the scruffy foreigners. Taras told me how much he was looking forward to seeing his beautiful wife. A little over a year later, in April 2003, Taras was killed when a U.S. tank fired a shell at a tall building in Baghdad which soldiers believed was a snipers' nest. They were wrong: the building was the Palestine Hotel where most of the international media was based during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the gleams of light the soldiers had seen were from the sun reflecting off camera lenses, not sniper sights. The shell hit the 15th floor balcony of the room used as the Reuters bureau, where Taras was filming. Jose Couso of Spain's Telecinco was filming from the balcony below, and also died. Three more Reuters colleagues - Samia Nakhoul, Paul Pasquale and Faleh Kheiber, were wounded. Taras left behind his wife, Lidia, and his son, Denis, who was eight when Taras died. A month after that, I started a two-year assignment in Baghdad, where I was bureau chief for Reuters. Over those two years, working conditions for journalists became almost unbearably extreme. The Reuters bureau was a house on a small side street near the Tigris River in central Baghdad. As an independent media organization we did not base ourselves within the protective confines of the U.S. Green Zone - we were in what U.S. officials referred to as the "Red Zone", which basically meant the entire country outside their heavily guarded compound. We were across the river from the Green Zone, which it turned out was not the best place to be during the several lengthy periods when the Mahdi Army, a radical Shi'ite militia which drew wide support from the dispossessed and angry young men in the vast slums in the east and northeast of Baghdad, rose up to fight U.S. forces. The mortars fired daily from the Shi'ite slums towards the Green Zone were not aimed with the most careful precision, and shells that landed short of their intended target would often land with a shattering explosion very close to us. It was in Iraq that I learned about the effects of explosions on the human body; a blast even some distance away would quite literally shake all the bones in your body as you dived under your desk in the office. I saw plenty of people who had been even closer to explosions, of course, and saw what had happened to them. I don't think I need to say more about that. As Iraq tumbled deeper into savage violence, doing our jobs and protecting our people became more and difficult. It was not an easy place to be bureau chief for Reuters. I was painfully aware that a bad decision by me could lead to terrible consequences for my colleagues. I woke up every morning as Reuters news teams in Baghdad and all over the country went out in their cars to report the news, and I relaxed a little late each evening when I knew that everyone had come home safe. But of course, sometimes they didn't come home. Mazen Dana, a Reuters cameraman from Hebron in the West Bank, was shot dead in August 2003 outside the Abu Ghraib prison compound just west of Baghdad. The U.S. soldier who shot him mistook Mazen's camera for a rocket propelled grenade launcher, an issue that was to lead to several more tragic deaths of journalists for Reuters and other organizations, and continues to haunt cameramen working in combat zones. Mazen left behind his wife, Suzanne, and four young children.
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